At the young age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — making her the first African American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so.[3]

After, she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she dealt with intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggle for liberation and their impact on the world. She died of cancer at the age of 34. Hansberry inspired Nina Simone's song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black".

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Lorraine Hansberry was the youngest of four children born to Carl Augustus Hansberry, a successful real-estate broker and Nannie Louise (born Perry), a driving school teacher and ward committeewoman. In 1938, her father bought a house in the Washington Park Subdivision of the South Side of Chicago, incurring the wrath of their white neighbors.[4] The latter's legal efforts to force the Hansberry family out culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Hansberry v. Lee. The restrictive covenant was ruled contestable, though not inherently invalid.[5]
Carl Hansberry was also a supporter of the Urban League and NAACP in Chicago. Both Hansberrys were active in the Chicago Republican Party.[6] Carl died in 1946, when Lorraine was fifteen years old; "American racism helped kill him," she later said.[7]

The Hansberrys were routinely visited by prominent Black people, including sociology professor W.E.B. DuBois, poet Langston Hughes, actor and political activist Paul Robeson, musician Duke Ellington and Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens. Carl Hansberry's brother, William Leo Hansberry, founded the African Civilization section of the history department at Howard University.[8] Lorraine was taught: "Above all, there were two things which were never to be betrayed: the family and the race."[6]

Lorraine Hansberry has many notable relatives including director and playwright Shauneille Perry, whose eldest child is named after her. Her grandniece is actress Taye Hansberry. Her cousin is the flutist, percussionist, and composer Aldridge Hansberry.

She decided in 1950 to leave Madison and pursue her career as a writer in New York City, where she attended The New School. She moved to Harlem in 1951[10] and became involved in activist struggles such as the fight against evictions.[12]

In 1951, she joined the staff of the black journal Freedom Newspaper, edited by Louis E. Burnham and published by Paul Robeson. At Freedom, she worked with W. E. B. Du Bois, whose office was in the same building, and other Black Pan-Africanists.[10] At the newspaper, she worked as "subscription clerk, receptionist, typist and editorial assistant" in addition to writing news articles and editorials.[13]

She worked on not only the US civil rights movement, but also global struggles against colonialism and imperialism.[11] Hansberry wrote in support of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, criticizing the mainstream press for its biased coverage.[13]

Hansberry often clarified these global struggles by explaining them in terms of female participants. She was particularly interested in the situation of Egypt, "the traditional Islamic 'cradle of civilization,' where women had led one of the most important fights anywhere for the equality of their sex."[16]

In 1952, Hansberry attended a peace conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, in place of Paul Robeson, who had been denied travel rights by the State Department.[10][17]

On June 20, 1953,[10] she married Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish publisher, songwriter and political activist.[18] Hansberry and Nemiroff moved to Greenwich Village, the setting of her second Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. Success of the song "Cindy, Oh Cindy", co-authored by Nemiroff, enabled Hansberry to start writing full-time.[10] On the night before their wedding in 1953, Nemiroff and Hansberry protested the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in New York City.[19]

It is widely believed that Hansberry was a closeted lesbian, a theory supported by her secret writings in letters and personal notebooks.[20][21] She was an activist for gay rights and wrote about feminism and homophobia, joining the Daughters of Bilitis and contributing two letters to their magazine, The Ladder, in 1957 under her initials "LHN." She separated from her husband at this time, but they continued to work together.[22][23]

Opening on March 11, 1959, A Raisin in the Sun became the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. The 29-year-old author became the youngest American playwright and only the fifth woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play.[24] Over the next two years, Raisin was translated into 35 languages and was being performed all over the world.[25]

In April 1959, as a sign of her growing fame, photographer David Attie did an extensive photo-shoot of Hansberry, at home in her Bleecker Street apartment, for Vogue magazine.[26]

Hansberry wrote two screenplays of Raisin, both of which were rejected as controversial by Columbia Pictures. Commissioned by NBC in 1960 to create a television program about slavery, Hansberry wrote The Drinking Gourd. This script was called "superb" but also rejected.[24]

In 1961, Hansberry was set to replace Vinnette Carroll as the director of the musical Kicks and Co, after its try-out at Chicago's McCormick Place. Written by Oscar Brown, Jr., it featured an interracial cast including Lonnie Sattin, Nichelle Nichols, Vi Velasco, Al Freeman, Jr., Zabeth Wilde, and Burgess Meredith in the title role of Mr. Kicks. A satire involving miscegenation, the $400,000 production was co-produced by her husband Robert Nemiroff; despite a warm reception in Chicago, the show never made it to Broadway.[27]

Also in 1963, Hansberry was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She underwent two operations, on June 24 and August 2. Neither of the surgeries was successful in removing the cancer.[24]

On March 10, 1964, Hansberry and Nemiroff divorced but continued to work together.[28]

While many of her other writings were published in her lifetime—essays, articles, and the text for the SNCC book The Movement—the only other play given a contemporary production was The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window.[29]The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window ran for 101 performances on Broadway[30] and closed the night she died.

According to historian Fanon Che Wilkins, "Hansberry believed that gaining civil rights in the United States and obtaining independence in colonial Africa were two sides of the same coin that presented similar challenges for Africans on both sides of the Atlantic."[31] In response to the independence of Ghana, led by Kwame Nkrumah, Hansberry wrote: "The promise of the future of Ghana is that of all the colored peoples of the world; it is the promise of freedom."[32]

Regarding tactics, Hansberry said Blacks "must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent.... They must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps—and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities."[33]

In a Town Hall debate on June 15, 1964, Hansberry criticized white liberals who couldn't accept civil disobedience, expressing a need "to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical." At the same time, she said, "some of the first people who have died so far in this struggle have been white men."[34]

Hansberry was a critic of existentialism, which she considered too distant from the world's economic and geopolitical realities.[35] Along these lines, she wrote a critical review of Richard Wright's The Outsider and went on to style her final play Les Blancs as a foil to Jean Genet's absurdist Les Nègres.[36] However, Hansberry admired Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.[37]

In 1959, Hansberry commented that women who are "twice oppressed" may become "twice militant". She held out some hope for male allies of women, writing in an unpublished essay: "If by some miracle women should not ever utter a single protest against their condition there would still exist among men those who could not endure in peace until her liberation had been achieved."[38]

Hansberry was appalled by the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which took place while she was in high school, and expressed desire for a future in which: "Nobody fights. We get rid of all the little bombs—and the big bombs." She did believe in the right of people to defend themselves with force against their oppressors.[33]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation began surveillance of Hansberry when she prepared to go to the Montevideo peace conference. The Washington, D.C., office searched her passport files "in an effort to obtain all available background material on the subject, any derogatory information contained therein, and a photograph and complete description," while officers in Milwaukee and Chicago examined her life history. Later, an FBI reviewer of Raisin in the Sun highlighted its Pan-Africanist themes as dangerous.[17]

Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer[39] on January 12, 1965, aged 34.[29]James Baldwin believed "it is not at all farfetched to suspect that what she saw contributed to the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a man."[40]

Hansberry's ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, became the executor for several unfinished manuscripts.[29] He added minor changes to complete the play Les Blancs, which Julius Lester termed her best work, and he adapted many of her writings into the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which was the longest-running Off Broadway play of the 1968–69 season.[42] It appeared in book form the following year under the title To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. She left behind an unfinished novel and several other plays, including The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers?, with a range of content, from slavery to a post-apocalyptic future.[29]

Raisin, a musical based on A Raisin in the Sun, opened in New York in 1973, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical, with the book by Nemiroff, music by Judd Woldin, and lyrics by Robert Britten. A Raisin in the Sun was revived on Broadway in 2004 and received a Tony Award nomination for Best Revival of a Play. The cast included Sean Combs ("P Diddy") as Walter Lee Younger Jr., Phylicia Rashad (Tony Award-winner for Best Actress) and Audra McDonald (Tony Award-winner for Best Featured Actress).[43] It was produced for television in 2008 with the same cast, garnering two NAACP Image Awards.

Nina Simone first released a song about Hansberry in 1969 called "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." The title of the song refers to the title of Hansberry's autobiography, which Hansberry first coined when speaking to the winners of a creative writing conference on May 1, 1964, "though it is a thrilling and marvellous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic — to be young, gifted and black."[44] Simone wrote the song with the poet Weldon Irvine and told him that she wanted lyrics that would "make black children all over the world feel good about themselves forever." When Irvine read the lyrics after it was finished, he thought, "I didn't write this. God wrote it through me." In a recording to the introduction of the song, Simone explained the difficulty of losing a close friend and talented artist.

The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre of San Francisco, which specializes in original stagings and revivals of African-American theatre, is named in her honor. Singer and pianist Nina Simone, who was a close friend of Hansberry, used the title of her unfinished play to write a civil rights-themed song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" together with Weldon Irvine. The single reached the top 10 of the R&B charts.[47] A studio recording by Simone was released as a single and the first live recording on October 26, 1969, was captured on Black Gold (1970).[48]

On the eightieth anniversary of Hansberry's birth, Adjoa Andoh presented a BBC Radio 4 programme entitled "Young, Gifted and Black" in tribute to her life.[50]

In 2010, Hansberry was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.[51]

In 2013, Hansberry was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display which celebrates LGBT history and people. This makes her the first Chicago-native honored along the North Halsted corridor.[52]

To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969)

Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays / by Lorraine Hansberry. Edited by Robert Nemiroff (1994)

Toussaint. This fragment from a work in progress, unfinished at the time of Hansberry's untimely death, deals with a Haitian plantation owner and his wife whose lives are soon to change drastically as a result of the revolution of Toussaint L'Ouverture. (From the Samuel French, Inc. catalogue of plays.)

^Wilkins, "Beyond Bandung" (2006), p. 194. "It was common for the Hansberry household to host a range of African-American luminaries such as Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington, Walter White, Joe E. Louis, Jesse Owens, and others. Indeed, Hansberry's uncle, William Leo Hansberry, was a distinguished professor of African history at Howard University and had made a name for himself as a specialist in African antiquity. Thus Hansberry became deeply familiar with pan-African ideas and the international contours of black liberation at an early age (8)."

^Carter, "Commitment amid Complexity" (1980), p. 47. "While working at Freedom, Hansberry also demonstrated her dedication to the cause by marching on picketlines, by speaking on street corners in Harlem, and by helping to move the furniture of evicted black tenants back into their apartments."

^ abWilkins, "Beyond Bandung" (2006), pp. 196–197. "In an article titled 'Kenya's Kikuyu: A Peaceful People Wage Heroic Struggle against the British,' Hansberry presented an opposite view and applauded the Kikuyu for 'helping to set fire to British Imperialism in Kenya.' Put off by the 'frantic dispatches about the "terrorists" and "witchcraft societies" in the colony' that preceded the December 1952 publication of her article, Hansberry criticized anti – Mau Mau coverage that only 'distort[ed] the fight for freedom by the five million Masai, Wahamba, Kavirondo, and Kikuyu people who [made] up the African people of Kenya.'"

^Anderson, "Freedom Family" (2008), p. 260. "No sooner had she joined Freedom, which had been founded by Paul Robeson as part of his tightening embrace of the Communist Party line in the increasingly frigid Cold War, than she was serving as a participant-correspondent: she accompanied the 'Sojourners for Truth and Justice,' a group of 132 black women from 15 states which was convened in September 1951, in Washington by the long-time activist Mary Church Terrell 'to demand that the Federal Government protect the lives and liberties' of black Americans. Hansberry's full-page report detailed the graphic and, inevitably, frustrating encounter between officials of the Justice Department and women like Amy Mallard, the widow of a World War II veteran who had been shot to death for attempting to vote in Georgia."

^Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism (2011), p. 60. "For Hansberry, existentialism encoded, politicized, and dramatized racial and sexual identities (because Jean Genet and Norman Mailer represented Blacks, gays, and prostitutes who exposed the falsities upon which modern life was scaffolded) but it denied the historical material conditions which gave rise to both oppression and social change. [...] Hansberry's review of Wright, then, was only an early salvo in an argument with the work of Genet and Mailer as well as that of Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, and Edward Albee over human existence, responsibility, and freedom. While these writers and thinkers presented diverse, even incommensurable world views, Hansberry understood them to be linked by an intellectually, politicaly, and morally bankrupt nihilism and solipsism."

^Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism (2011), pp. 64–65. "Yet even in her unwavering criticism of existentialism, Hansberry did not dismiss it: she was strongly influenced by the existentialist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which she called a 'great book' that might 'very well be the most important work of this century.'"